Federal and State Legislative Activity Around Mine
Safety

The Senate appropriations commitee
held a hearing on the Sago tragedy today. The most interesting part was when
the Senator Tom Harken asked about new technologies
that could help locate miners and communicate with them after an accident,
Acting Assistant Secretary for MSHA, Robert Dye said
that the technologies still hard problems.

Then up came DavittMcAteer,
head of MSHA under Clinton
and currently W.Va Governor Manchin's
advisor for mine safety, held up the devices and objected:

"To act like these devices aren't ready to go is just
plain wrong," he said, adding, small low-frequency tracking devices and
one-way text messaging had both already been approved for use and had
contributed to saving lives at several mines that voluntarily adopted their
use.

McAteer said that the messaging
devices would cost up to $150,000 for a mine the size of Sago (or $750 per
miner) and the transponders used to locate lost miners would only cost $20 per
miner. McAteer said that no mines in the United States were using the text messaging
technology (allowing those above ground to communicate with the miners (for
example, about where to find fresh air or evacuation routes), although it was
in widespread use in Australia
where the government helped develop it. The locator devices, according to McAteer were being used in perhaps 14 out of the 15,000
coal and metal/non-metal mines in the country.

Harkin responded, "Gosh, I hate to regulate everythinhg,
but dogone it, if they're not going to do it, we've
got to force them to do it."

Meanwhile, the West Virginia
legislature unanimously
passed a bill that would require mines to use electronic devices to track
trapped miners and stockpile oxygen to keep them alive until help arrives.

"No miner's family is going to have to endure what we
all endured for 90 hours over the past three weeks," the governor said.

If the 14 miners who died in two accidents since Jan. 2 had been wearing
tracking devices, "we could have concentrated all our efforts, all our
resources on that one location," Manchin said.

The legislation also required extra supplies of oxygen to be
placed around the mine and

Manchin also proposed to fine coal
companies $100,000 if they fail to report an emergency within 15 minutes. At
Sago, company officials placed the first calls to state and federal safety
officials more than an hour after the explosion. It was not immediately clear
when the first calls were placed in the Aracoma fire.